Why Is It There How a Cat Became Integral to Cate Blanchett’s ‘Disclaimer’ Performance

Cate Blanchett‘s Disclaimer role turned out to be much more than an epic performance of a celebrated documentarian watching her life fall apart: She discovered how to bone a fish and handle cats that as well.

As it happens, the pets of Blanchett and Sasha Baron Cohen in Alfonso Cuarón produced thriller show, are a significant part of the show’s metaphoric texture. Speaking to audiences after the BFI London Film Festival screening of the show’s first three episodes Thursday were the cast: Blanchett, Baron Cohen, Kevin Kline, Louis Partridge, Leila George and HoYeon Jung.

Seven episodes adapted of the novel analyse the destiny of the brilliant creative Catherine Ravenscroft (Blanchett) and her husband Robert (Baron Cohen), whose life is changed after a book called The Perfect Stranger is sent to Catherine and – to her deep frustration – reveals a secret that she wanted to remain buried. On the same note a directionless son Nicholas, Kodi Smit-McPhee becomes a distraction to the couple. The teacher, who divorced and recently became a widower, who published this book (Kline) is reveling smugly in the fire that he ignited in young life of Catherine after he lost his son, Jonathon (Partridge).

One cannot help but pay attention to some of the secondary, non-human roles, either: the Ravenscrofts’ cat who hobs in and out of frame of the beautiful London flat of the central pair from Disclaimer. In one scene when Blanchett and Marwood’s characters are cleaning fish, the latter one is preparing sole, there is a scene of a not so obedient cat which gives her much trouble.

It was quite witty — but Cuarón was indeed very deliberate about it; Blanchett got to realize its relevance in the show quite soon.

This one may look like; why is the cat there? The sequel is a bit peculiar on this account and then I realized Blanchett said. To be precise I do remember that one particular shot where I was given the deboning fish lessons and did the shot. My family consumed a lot of fish during this shoot… Then it could go fine—just when I got the deboning right, when we had done a few takes, [Cuarón] is like, ‘Put the cat in.'”)

“By introducing an animal,” she said to her director in a microphone , “what you were saying is that you can’t control it.” I can still hear her sniff but then she turns gentler: There is evil in your lustural… I have the feeling that we have to rule our lives, when we are actually being so completely out of our minds. And everyone, you know, we’re so out of control in the world right now, and then you bring an animal into these very structured systems, and then it’s just organized chaos all the time.

“He said, ‘I think that was quite a clever, quite a discreet way of observing these people being constantly in a state of chaos’.

Cuarón half-joked: “I think it was so great to watch Cate suffering.” Frigidly removing the cat, cooking it, and never losing an iota of the character for this woman, to act in this manner as the character would be doing it. For me, it was a pleasure.”

He continued: Cate ruined the cat,” I have to say. Indeed, at that point, the cat was simply forced to do whatever Cate wanted. The animal trainer was very upset because he said: They love it they made David Blaine look amateur in comparison so Mr. Cat does do whatever it wants to do, it took me three years to teach this cat to go from A to B. Blanchett later insisted that she is actually an animal-lover and indeed has two cats, four dogs and six chickens at her house.

As always, Cuarón and Blanchett took the opportunity to gush over one another’s genius, with the former saying: Cate as an executive was…frequently we observe many credits that are sheer window dressing. And Cate was not. She was a part of all those that involve casting every single time, every single instance.

The cast was riddled with compliments for the Roma and the director of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. “Quite often, when working with people, it is as if this particular phenomenon requires you to start believing in it when you are implementing it,” Partridge said. “So yeah, [his] vote of confidence and just seeing how meticulous you are with everything …. It’s a luxury that isn’t afforded on every job.”

The word meticulous — that word turned up frequently whenever the actors were speaking about Cuarón ’s style of working. “You’ll see when you get to the end of the show ,” Blanchett added , “that Alfonso is absolutely meticulous and had a very clear vision .”